The source of that threat is the most powerful health authority in our increasingly globalized world; the Swiss-based, unaccountable, international non-profit organization known as the WHO.
The scale and nature of the threat will become apparent in the coming months, during the lead-up to the voting by 196 countries at the next meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva between May 27 and June 1.
The votes will determine how countries should respond in the event of future pandemics or global health emergencies, circumstances we are told over and over again we should come to expect more often than in the past.
The global plan is being driven by the WHO and its leading funders, the top six, in descending order of contribution, being Germany, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the U.S., the European Commission, the GAVI Alliance, and the United Kingdom (U.K.).
If the WHO declares another pandemic or “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC), something it can do unilaterally based on very limited criteria, the plan if enacted, will involve an international response, and consequent national responses, that run quite differently to our recent experience of the COVID-19 pandemic between March 2020 and May 2023.
It should be noted that a single individual, namely the director-general of the WHO, currently Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has the sole power to declare a PHEIC, and this one individual is unelected by the people, unaccountable and has immunity from prosecution by virtue of “diplomatic immunity.”
The next time round, the pandemic response by nations and international authorities will almost certainly be more authoritarian and control will be much more centralized, masterminded from the WHO headquarters in Geneva.
Countries will have a binding responsibility to comply with their masters at the WHO, and rich countries will have to gift lots of their hard-won money and healthcare products to poorer countries.
Ostensibly, the goals of the WHO are worthy, “to promote, provide and protect health and wellbeing for all people, everywhere.”
These are the first three Ps that Ghebreyesus spoke of in his opening remarks to the 154th session of the Executive Board of the WHO on Jan. 22. (In case you wondered, the other two Ps are Power and Perform, concepts that can seem scary in the hands of an unaccountable body).
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